Given the reactions of the left to both the Acorn and Planned Parenthood stings you might be surprised to learn that Eyeblast.tv has uncovered a nearly identical sting, at least in terms of tactics, against crisis pregnancy centers that ABC News did back in 1991. Apparently back then the Left had zero problems with undercover video investigations aimed at proving a political point. They were also perfectly fine with showing just how much contempt they had for the “bad guys” they recorded.

In fact, Chris Wallace’s entire ABC report is drenched in condemnation and outrage. What exactly did these crisis pregnancy centers do that was so worthy of ABC’s attacks? Well, as far as I can tell, the overarching criticism is that they don’t want women to have abortions for various different reasons that ABC doesn’t agree with.

In Jason Mattera's new book "Obama Zombies" the Young America's Foundation media spokesman takes on, and takes down, the liberal machine that brainwashed a generation.

As the biggest and most influential cog in the liberal propaganda machine, Mattera hits the media in the very first chapter, chronicling the most egregious instances of bias from the 2008 campaign and the impact they had on young people.

With the midterm election season heating up, particularly in the wake of the passage of ObamaCare, the Washington Post is expanding its blogging outfit. Less than a year after I wrote about the Post hiring flaming liberal Ezra "not everything the Nazis touched was bad" Klein, the paper has hired another blogger who has been critical of the Right, and his beat will be, you guessed it, covering conservatives.

Early Saturday morning new developments arose in the controversy surrounding AOL News' decision to fire liberal writer Tommy Christopher. As first reported by NewsBusters many believed that the evidence pointed to Tommy Christopher's critique of Playboy writer Guy Cimbalo's attack on conservative women as the catalyst for his firing. However, though NewsBusters has still received no response to our repeated attempts to contact both Time Warner and AOL Politics Daily Chief Editor Melinda Henneberger, Henneberger has released this statement to Jason Linkins of The Huffington Post:

Does it make a lick of sense to you that I would fire anyone for standing up for women, or for taking on that disgusting story in Playboy? The bloggers for the old AOL site, Political Machine, weren't retained for the new site, Politics Daily, which has only been in existence for the last five weeks, and which we're just staffing up. Sorry so dull, but there's nothing more to it than that.

AOL News has been bending over backwards lately to make sure that they do not cover the controversy surrounding Playboy.com writer Guy Cimbalo's vile attack on conservative women. AOL News has taken some drastic steps to censor any mention, let alone criticism, of Playboy's screed. They have deleted posts about the article, banned contributors from mentioning it, and even fired one of their liberal writers over it.

The fact that banning reporters from, well, reporting is so contrary to the purpose of a news organization it really is puzzling. It seems to be in direct contrast to their commitment to "traditional journalistic values".

The evidence is stacking up quite high that AOL News fired liberal writer Tommy Christopher today due to his repeated attempts to get coverage of the Playboy attack list on AOL's Politics Daily. Christopher had first attempted to post this criticism of Playboy's sick list the day it was published on their website. However, he was surprised to find that shortly after putting his article on Politics Daily it was deleted by an editor.

His surprise stemmed from the fact that in his two years of writing for the site not one other post had ever been deleted by an editor.

Yesterday, Playboy writer Guy Cimbalo published a top ten list of conservative women against whom he would like to commit vulgar and violent sexual acts. His piece, which has since been removed by the skin mag's Web site, was actually promoted to conservative sites like NewsBusters by Playboy's PR people (see editor's note at bottom of the post). Cimbalo's hate-filled and misogynistic write-up drew the condemnation of many conservatives and even some liberals.

It seems that the Washington Post will soon be welcoming ultra-liberal hack blogger Ezra Klein to their online operations. Klein has often been the subject of stories by NewsBusters. This is what the Politico reported on the Post's acquisition of Klein (h/t OTB):

The American Prospect's Ezra Klein, one of the top bloggers on politics and policy, is heading to the Washington Post.

Rumors about Klein's upcoming move spread on Wednesday night during a reception thrown by The Nation magazine in honor of D.C. bureau chief Chris Hayes.

A Post spokesperson confirmed to POLITICO this morning that Klein was hired as a blogger at washingtonpost.com and is expected to start in about a month.

The move continues a regrettable trend started with their hiring of Greg Sargent, who formerly worked for the far left Talking Points Memo, to run a blog at one of the Post's websites. The addition of Sargent, an accomplished hack in his own right, was covered by Tim Graham here at NewsBusters. Tim quickly identified it as yet another example of the revolving door between liberal organizations and the mainstream media:

The New York Times Company is burning full blast towards oblivion and if they don't figure out a way to pull out of their death spiral soon it won't be pretty. In fact, in the first quarter of 2009 the Times lost an incredible $74.5 million which was far far beyond what analysts had predicted. Here's how the Times describes it's own deterioration:

The New York Times Company reported a first-quarter loss of $74.5 million on Tuesday, compared with a loss of $335,000 in the period a year ago, as it joined the roster of newspaper companies recording the steepest advertising declines in generations.

Advertising revenue at the company’s publishing segment fell 28.4 percent in the quarter, including an 8 percent decline in Internet advertising at the News Media Group.

[...]

The Times Company’s total revenue of $609 million, down 18.6 percent from $747.9 million in the first quarter a year ago, fell more than $20 million short of analysts’ projections.

Of course this abysmal performance is already being spun by the Times itself and the Associated Press as nothing more than a result of a shift in marketing and the poor economy:

Susan Roesgen, the hack who harassed tea party goers, was a driving force behind the flawed Jena 6 narrative that circulated the MSM cesspool back in 2007. The level of professionalism which made her famous on tax day has clearly been par for course in Roesgen's career. Patterico has uncovered the extent of her involvement pushing the absurd and reprehensible racially charged narrative:

Several months following the 2008 presidential election, most politics websites have experienced an expected downturn in monthly visitors. Most attribute the slower traffic to the inevitable short-term loss of interest in politics following such a major election. However, despite this reality, there is a bright spot for those of us on the right.

It seems that while visitors drop off they don't do so equally across the web. According to Simon Owens, the left is falling much harder and faster than their conservative counterparts:

My recent political blog traffic studies found that web traffic is down all across the board for all political blogs, but left-of-center sites have on average taken a much steeper hit (a 58% drop compared to the right's 36% fall).

And as they point out, many center-right web sites are weathering this traffic storm quite well. In fact Red State is seeing more visitors than they have in comparable times:

The New York Observer has noticed an interesting new trend at The New York Times. Its something that we have rarely, if ever, seen from The Times in it's long history. In fact, we are used to seeing a defiant and rather confident Times:

There was a time when The New York Times never had to say anything back. If the newspaper caught hell for a story in the popular media, editors at the paper could rely on the time-tested formulation: "The story speaks for itself." When critics carped about the newspapers' editorial vision, business plan, or financial position, it was once enough for Arthur Sulzberger or Janet Robinson to just sort of roll their eyes and move along. At the end of the day, The New York Times was still The New York Times.

No longer. Now, as The Observer chronicled, every criticism leveled at The Times is met with an immediate, if not insecure, defense. The trend seems to have started with the debacle surrounding the famous McCain/Lobbyist article in which The Times incompetently insinuated that Senator McCain had an affair. However, the defensiveness has continued at a more frequent pace since then:

As the downward spiral of old media continues at an ever faster pace many have begun to wonder what's next. Well, PBS's MediaShift blog has been mulling it over in a series of posts. Their thoughts on the current and future state of news are quite insightful and certainly warrant dissection and discussion.

Stephen Strauss starts off by noting the recent downfall of many main stream newspapers, as reported on NB by yours truly, and the resulting end of the "tyranny of reporters". Strauss celebrates the downfall of old media because of increased flow of information it has caused:

In the old print/radio/television world there wasn't much else you could do. Space and time was limited and so many things had to be left out, ignored or radically reconfigured. In ways that I don't think we truly appreciated, the media -- or rather the limitations of the media -- was the message.

One of the most magisterial things the Internet is doing is undermining the previous writer/editor dictatorship. Suddenly, what used to be effectively a one-sided conversation in which the writer did all the talking has been turned into an agora in which a piece is dissected and often reconstructed by the readers -- and if we ever get there, listeners and viewers, too.

The AP is reporting on a near avalanche of newspapers that are either closing down their print operations or making severe cuts. Apparently things aren't looking up for old media:

The pall looming over U.S. newspapers grew even darker Monday as Gannett Co. informed most of its employees that they will have to take another week of unpaid leave this spring, while a Michigan daily unveiled plans to close its print edition after 174 years.And The Plain Dealer, Ohio's largest newspaper, also ordered pay cuts and 10-day furloughs for nonunion employees Monday to cut costs as advertising revenue drops.

The moves were just the latest sign of the distress afflicting newspapers across the country as they try to cope with a dramatic shift in advertising that is forcing publishers to figure out how to survive with substantially less revenue.

There were many famous people at CPAC this year and I was lucky enough to run into some of them. And some of those I ran into even let me ask them a few questions about media bias. The resulting videos are embedded below the fold.

The four interviews I was able to get where with Joe the Plumber, John Ziegler, George Phillips, and Roger Simon. Each have unique experiences with liberal media bias and each articulated different but insightful points about the media.

Make sure you check out each of the videos and watch them all the way through.

There is a new group throwing its hat in the "reform the conservative movement" ring. They are called the Young Conservatives Coalition and they want to raise up a new generation of conservative leaders. Here is a snippet of how they describe themselves:

The YCC is an advocacy organization dedicated to leading the next generation of the conservative movement by organizing and mobilizing young professional conservatives across the country. The coalition seeks to answer two questions: 1.) What does it mean to be a conservative in the year 2009? and 2.) Who will lead the next generation of the conservative movement?

The New York Times is reporting today that it has reached a settlement with Vicki Iseman in her defamation suit against the paper. The suit stemmed from the NYT article which insinuated Iseman had an affair with John McCain. Here are the terms of the settlement:

In one of the most comical Politico stories I have ever encountered, several prominent journalists insisted that the revolving door between the media and liberal Democrats, especially Team Obama, is not a symptom of bias. Instead, they blamed the trend on the economy:

In three months since Election Day, at least a half-dozen prominent journalists have taken jobs working for the federal government.

Journalists, including some of those who’ve jumped ship, say it’s better to have a solid job in government than a shaky job — or none at all — in an industry that’s fading fast.

In yet another example of flag spamming and poor corporate over sight Facebook decided this week to remove an ad from the conservative group Americans for Prosperity. The group was advertising a petition on their site nostimulus.com which lets people voice their opposition to the near $800 billion stimulus going through congress right now.

After originally screening and approving the ad CNS News, a sister site of NewsBusters and the Media Research Center, reports that Facebook claimed to have received some complaints from users. They then proceeded to put a disapproval notice on it and then yank it from the site all together and notified Americans for Prosperity of their reasoning:

Once the NoStimulus.com Web site started getting a large volume of visitors, Kerpen told CNSNews.com, “they put a disapproval notice on it and they pulled the ad."

The mission of the Media Research Center is to create a media culture in America where truth and liberty flourish. The MRC is a research and education organization operating under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, and contributions to the MRC are tax-deductible.

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